category Talks

Reactive Programming in JavaScript (funjs London, April 2014)

I gave a presentation on Reactive Programming in JavaScript at FunctionalJS London on 28th April 2014.

To describe reactive programming, I like to think of the key concepts of functional programming (using values and functional composition to solve problems in a declarative style) applied to real-world constraints such as async, mutable state and UIs.

The main idea behind reactive programming is that of “data types that represent values over time”. Because they are values (rather than side-effecting callbacks, for instance), they can be passed around and composed like any value, abstracting away the execution flow into declarative expressions.

For UIs, data-bindings provide a declarative mean to bind values (either plain values or reactive “observables”) to the view.

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The Symbiotic Web (Frontend London, Nov 2013)

Somewhat on the late, here is the presentation on The Symbiotic Web I gave at Frontend London last November.

Have you ever wondered: is the Web a platform for Information or for Applications? Is one the “correct Web” and the other a perversion of its true purpose?

Answering this question takes us back to the roots of the Web, namely the two key concepts of URIs and links. They are what truly make the power of the Web, alongside the descriptive HTML format, for both humans and machines that use it. For humans, we tend to add visual ornaments through the presentation layer (CSS), whereas we feed machines extra information through the semantic layer (e.g. Schema.org, micro-formats, etc).

At the same time, it’s no denying the growing role of the Web as a platform to distribute and run applications. However, the danger is that we compromise the mission of the Web to distribute information in a standard readable format, by hiding it behind the execution of JavaScript and proprietary APIs.

Maybe the true power of the Web is found at the intersection.

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